Tuesday, April 29, 2008 - Posts
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Per The Hill, Hillary Clinton is requesting $2.3 billion in earmarks for 2009. That number alone doesn’t mean much unless you compare it to the combined $0 being requested by John McCain and Barack Obama.
Clinton has every reason to request a load of earmarks: She serves a big state with legitimate security needs. But as a general election candidate, a request that size—the most any senator received this year was $837 million—could be a real liability. Anytime Clinton mentions fiscal responsibility, a core part of her case against Bush, McCain could just drop the phrase “$2.3 billion.” Remember how he went to town on her Woodstock museum—and that cost only $1 million.
Against Obama, by contrast, McCain couldn’t say much. Obama has obtained earmarks in the past, but he released them earlier this year and pledged not to request more. (Obama's earmark requests for 2008 added up to more than $300,000.) The Arizona senator could always accuse Obama of opportunistically forgoing pork just during election season. But Obama could highlight exceptions to McCain’s blanket veto, such as aid to Israel, not to mention McCain’s own ethical slip-ups of yore. What might be a cudgel against Clinton would be a Nerf bat against Obama.
The Hill points out that the requests could be preparing a “soft landing” in case this whole presidency thing doesn’t work out. After all, it’s part of a senator’s job to obtain funding for local projects. But in softening her landing, she also makes her current opponent look stronger.
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Slate's Timothy Noah passes along this analysis:
“Right here, over 200 Hoosiers built parts that guided our military’s smart bombs to their targets,” Hillary Clinton says in a TV spot currently airing in Indiana. The camera zooms in on a shuttered factory in Valparaiso, Ind., formerly operated by a defense contractor called Magnequench—one of two Indiana facilities the company closed down after it was purchased by a Chinese consortium. Clinton’s voice-over continues:
They were good jobs. But now, they’re gone to China, and America’s defense relies on Chinese spare parts. George Bush could’ve stopped it, but he didn’t. As your president, I will fight to keep good jobs here and to turn this economy around. ... American workers should build America’s defense.
Just one little problem. As blogger David Sirota points out, the Chinese consortium’s acquisition of Magnequench occurred way back in 1995, when Hillary’s husband was president. Before the sale could go through, it had to be approved by an executive-branch panel called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Apparently it was, partly in deference to highly implausible promises by the Chinese that the weapons parts would continue to be built in the United States. (The takeover was also greased by participation in the deal by Archibald Cox Jr., son of the revered Watergate prosecutor and Common Cause chairman, now deceased.) In 2003 the Chinese welshed on its promises and moved production to China, prompting Sen. Evan Bayh, D.-Ind., to ask President Bush to intercede. Apparently Bush had some legal authority to force Magnequench’s return to U.S. ownership, but even Hillary seemed to concede, in a speech two weeks ago in Pennsylvania, that such a move was impractical at that late date. (“Couldn’t do it.”) The point is that no such divestiture would have been necessary had Hillary’s husband disallowed the deal eight years earlier.
Hillary’s chutzpah in flagging this issue is compounded by her criticism of the sale on national-security grounds (“They're building up their military. They want to compete with us every step of the way. And we're basically helping them.”) In the late 1990s, Republicans in Congress decided that U.S.-approved technology transfers to China under Clinton were creating a disastrous national-security breach, and conservatives tried to stir anxieties about imminent U.S. surrender to the Middle Kingdom to defeat presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000. Now, to win Indiana, Hillary Clinton seems to be saying that the wingers were right all along about that no-good husband of hers.
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In a press conference today, Barack Obama pronounced himself "outraged" and "saddened" at "the spectacle" of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s recent remarks alleging that the government invented AIDS, equating U.S. military efforts abroad with terrorism, and defending Louis Farrakhan’s denunciation of Zionism. "I do not see the relationship being the same after this," Obama said. On a personal level, it’s pretty sad—the presser looked painful. Politically, though, Wright may have done Obama an inadvertent favor. Obama won praise last month when he carved out a nuanced view of his relationship with Wright ("I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community"), but as time went on, this ambivalence dogged him. Hillary seized the moment to assure voters that Wright "wouldn’t have been my pastor," John McCain overcame an initial reluctance to attack Obama about Wright, and GOP state parties in North Carolina and Mississippi used the issue against down-ticket Dems endorsed by Obama.
Now Wright has forced Obama to put greater distance between the two men. If both the Rev. Wright and a bus had been on hand, Obama may well have physically thrown him under it. It will now be harder for Obama’s opponents to accuse him of making excuses for the excitable pastor. They’ll have to shift to asking why it took Obama so long to have this Sister Souljah moment. But that’s better than the alternative.
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The “gas-tax holiday” recommended by John McCain (and endorsed in part by Hillary Clinton) proposes a temporary reduction of the federal gas tax by 18.4 cents per gallon between Memorial Day and Labor Day. But how temporary would it likely be? Reimposing any tax once it’s been suspended is notoriously difficult politically, as McCain himself can attest. McCain opposed Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, but he subsequently voted to extend them because, he argued, failure to do so would constitute a tax hike. “I've never voted for a tax increase in twenty-four years,” McCain said, “… and I will never vote for a tax increase, nor support a tax increase.” If we accept this logic, then there is no such thing as a temporary tax cut. McCain, as a matter of principle, wouldn’t be able to reimpose the gas tax come Sept. 2. And it would be very difficult for Congress to do so, with Election Day just two months off.
But this discussion is probably academic. Yesterday, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Bush opposed the idea. Today, Bush moderated that stance, saying he was “open to any ideas.” But Congress wouldn’t likely support a gas-tax holiday, seeing as the gas tax supports road construction projects that are near and dear to the hearts of its members. Clinton's plan says she would make up that loss by raising taxes on windfall profits for oil companies, but that's no more politically palatable, either -- the phrase "windfall profits tax" brings back unwelcome memories of the Carter administration.
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A media frenzy over the Rev. Wright, a bump in matchup polls, and a key North Carolina endorsement buoy Clinton's chances 0.5 points to 12.9
percent.
The response to the Rev. Wright's speech at the National Press Club was so
negative, some papers must be prepping Barack Obama's obituary. "PASTOR
DISASTER," screamed the New York Post. The Washington Post's
Dana Milbank, under the headline "Could Rev. Wright Spell Doom for
Obama?," argues that Wright "added lighter fuel" to the
controversy by repeating some of his most inflammatory ideas. Indeed, Wright
criticized America's
foreign policy, praised Louis Farrakhan, and reiterated his conviction that the
government created AIDS as a method of population control. In Bob Herbert's
words, Wright went to Washington
"not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him."
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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